Three nights passed then before I managed to find Ezra again. On one of those, I’d gone out with Harlow. She’d come to my door, wearing a jeans jacket and tiny hoop earrings. Gold glitter frosted her hair because, she said, brushing it away with her fingers, she’d walked through a party on her way to my place. A golden wedding anniversary. “Like having just one husband in your whole life is something to brag about,” she said. And then, “Look. I know you’re mad. That was totally wack, crashing at your place without asking. I get it.”
“I’m over it,” I told her, and she said in that case, even though it was only Tuesday and too early for the traditional weekend bacchanal (in 1996, I believe, that still started on Thursday; I’m told it’s Wednesday now), I should let her buy me a beer. We walked downtown, past Sweet Briar Books and the big tomato sculpture at the food co-op, past the Jack in the Box and Valley Wine to the corner opposite the train station where the Paragon bar was. The sun was down, but the horizon still a scarlet slash. Crows were rioting in the trees.
I hadn’t always loved the big sky here, or the flat, fenced yards, or the year-round summery smell of cow shit. But I’d submitted to the fences, stopped noticing the smell, and was a convert to the sky. The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less. I feel the same about crows, though I know there are some who don’t. Their loss.
I’d rarely been to the Paragon; the college crowd goes elsewhere. It’s about as close as Davis gets to rough, which means that the drinkers there are serious, they show up, an army of the mutant undead who mostly once went to Davis High School, where they lived high old lives of football or skateboarding or keggers. There was a game on the television, volume up—Knicks versus Lakers—plus a lot of zombified nostalgia in the room. It added up to an intermittent din.
Everyone seemed to know Harlow. The bartender brought our drinks himself. Every time I ate a few peanuts, he came and refilled the bowl. Every time we finished our beers, new ones arrived, courtesy of one guy or another, who’d then come to the table only to have Harlow send him away. “I’m so sorry,” she’d say with a sugar-sparkle smile. “But we are just right in the middle of something here.”
I asked her: where she was from (Fresno), how long she’d been in Davis (three years), and what she planned after college. Her dream was to live in Ashland, Oregon, and design sets and lighting for the Shakespeare Company there.
She asked me: would I rather be deaf or blind, smart or beautiful? Would I marry a man I hated to save his soul? Had I ever had a vaginal orgasm? Who was my favorite superhero? Which politicians would I go down on?
I have never been so thoroughly drawn out.
Whom did I love best, my mother or my father?
Now we were inching into dangerous territory. Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking. I can still talk when I need to. I haven’t forgotten how to talk.
So I told Harlow about a summer when I was little, the summer we moved from the farmhouse. It’s a story I’ve told often, my go-to story when I’m being asked about my family. It’s meant to look intimate, meant to look like me opening up and digging deep. It works less well when bits have to be shouted top-volume in a rampageous bar.
It starts in the middle, with me being shipped off to my Grandpa Joe and Grandma Fredericka’s. There was no warning of this and I couldn’t now remember what my parents had told me as to why—whatever it was, I wasn’t buying. I knew the winds of doom when they blew. I believed I’d done something so bad, I’d been given away.
• • •
MY COOKE GRANDPARENTS lived in Indianapolis. They had this hot, airless house with a smell that was almost nice but not quite, sort of like stale cookies. There was a painting of a man and woman in harlequin masks in my bedroom and all that faux Asian stuff in the living room. Really faux. Faux faux. Remember those disturbing sages with their real human fingernails? Now imagine trying to sleep in that house.
The few other kids on the street were a lot older. I would stand behind the front-door screen and watch them, wishing they’d ask me something I knew the answer to, but they didn’t. Sometimes I would go out back, but Grandpa Joe had put in concrete so as to not have the yard work, and it was even hotter than in the house. I’d bounce a ball or watch ants in the flower beds for a while, and then I’d go back in and whine for a popsicle.
My grandparents mostly watched TV or slept in their chairs in front of it. I got to see cartoons every Saturday, which wasn’t allowed at home, and I saw at least three episodes of Super Friends, so I must have been there at least three weeks. Most afternoons, there was a soap opera we all watched together. There was this guy named Larry and his wife, Karen. Larry was head of a hospital and Karen entertained gentlemen while he was at work, which didn’t sound so bad to me, yet clearly was.
“One Life to Live,” said Harlow.
“Whatever.”
Grandma Fredericka would get annoyed because I talked all through the show even as she complained that it was all sexed up and no good anymore. It used to be about family, she’d say. It used to be something you could watch with your five-year-old grandbaby in the room. But Grandpa Joe said my talking made the show better. He warned me, though, to remember that real people didn’t really behave like this, as if I might go home thinking it was okay to switch places with your twin brother so as to fake your own death, or steal another mother’s baby if your own had died.
But mostly there was nothing to do. Every day exactly the same, and every night, bad dreams of pinching fingers and harlequin masks. Lots of breakfasts of scrambled eggs with gross little white flecks in them, which I never ate but they kept serving me anyway. “You’ll never be bigger than a minute,” Grandma Fredericka would say, scraping my plate sadly into the trash. And—“Can you hush up for just one minute so I can hear myself think?” Something people had been asking me for as long as I could remember. Back then, the answer was no.
Then she met some woman at the beauty shop, who said I could come and play with her kids. We had to drive to get there. Her kids turned out to be two strapping boys—one of them was only six, but he was already enormous. They had a trampoline and I was wearing a skirt that flew up when I jumped and everyone could see my underpants. I don’t remember if they were mean about it or I was just humiliated on principle. But that was the end for me; I cracked. When no one was paying attention, I walked out the door and I intended to walk the whole way home. Real home. Bloomington.
I knew I would have to walk a long time. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind I might go in the wrong direction. I chose streets with shady lawns and sprinklers. A woman on a porch asked me where my parents were and I said I was visiting my grandparents. She didn’t ask anything else. It must have already been very late when I started, because I was only five; I can’t have walked too far, whatever it felt like, and soon it was getting dark.
I picked out a house because I liked the color. It was painted bright blue and had a red door. And it was tiny, like a house in a fairy tale. I knocked, and a man in a bathrobe and undershirt answered. He asked me in and gave me a glass of Kool-Aid while we sat at the kitchen table. He was nice. I told him about Larry and Karen, the harlequins, the enormous boys, walking back to Bloomington. He listened very seriously and then pointed out a few flaws in my plan I hadn’t noticed. He said if I just knocked on doors and asked for dinner or lunch, I might be fed some foods I didn’t like. I might be expected to clean my plate, because that was the rule in some houses, and they might give me Brussels sprouts or liver or whatever it was I hated most. I was ready to be talked out of walking to Bloomington anyway.
So I told him my grandparents were the Cookes, and he called a couple of Cookes in the phone book till he found them. They fetched me and I was sent back home the next day, because, they said, I’d turned out to be a handful and real noisy to boot.
• • •
“YOUR MOTHER WASN’T havi
ng a baby?” Harlow asked.
“No,” I said.
“I just thought—I mean, isn’t that the usual reason a kid gets sent off to stay with the grandparents? We’re talking the classics here.”
My mother wasn’t having a baby; she was having a nervous breakdown, but I had no intention of telling Harlow that. The beauty, the utility of this story is in its power to distract. So I said instead, “I haven’t told you the weird part yet,” and Harlow clapped her hands together with a loud smack. Drinking, like being arrested, made her unnervingly agreeable.
A man wearing a Celtics jersey approached our table, but Harlow waved him away. She did so with a this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you expression on her face. “We’re just getting to the weird part,” she explained. He hung around a few minutes, hoping to hear the weird part for himself, but it wasn’t for everyone and I waited him out.
“When I was in the little blue house, I asked to use the bathroom,” I said, lowering my voice and leaning in so close I could smell the hops on Harlow’s breath. “The guy in the bathrobe told me it was the second door on the right, but I was five years old. So I opened the wrong door, a bedroom door. And there on the bed was this woman, lying on her stomach, with her hands and feet all tied up with pantyhose behind her back. Trussed. There was something stuffed in her mouth. Maybe men’s socks.
“When I opened the door, she turned her head to look at me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think. I had this silvery sharp sense of something very very wrong. Then—”
There was a brief cold wind as someone opened the door into the Paragon, came inside, closed the door.
“She winked at me,” I said.
• • •
A MAN WALKED up behind Harlow and put a hand on the back of her neck. He was wearing a black knit toque with a Canadian maple-leaf on it, and had a sharp nose that swerved slightly left. Surfer-type, but in a minor key. He was a good-looking guy and I’d last seen him in the university cafeteria, dodging Harlow’s sugar cubes. “Rose, this is Reg,” Harlow said. “Of whom you’ve heard me speak so lovingly.”
Reg didn’t acknowledge me. “I thought you said you had to work.”
“I thought you were going to the library.”
“I thought there was some crisis with the show. All hands on deck.”
“I thought you had this big test you had to study for. Your whole future hanging in the balance.”
Reg grabbed a chair from a neighboring table and helped himself to Harlow’s beer. “You’ll thank me later,” he said.
“Hold your breath, why don’t you?” Harlow suggested sweetly. And then, “Rosemary’s favorite superhero is Tarzan.”
“No, he’s not,” Reg said, not missing a beat. “Because Tarzan doesn’t have superpowers. He’s not a superhero.”
“I told her that!”
This was true. I hadn’t had a favorite superhero until Harlow asked. And then I’d picked Tarzan on impulse, same as I’d done with her other questions, a freewheeling exercise in free-association. But the more she’d questioned my choice, the more committed I’d become to it. I tend to do that in the face of opposition. Ask my dad.
And now that she’d reopened the argument, I thought it was cowardly of her, pretending to be convinced when she was really just lying low, waiting for backup to arrive.
But outnumbered is not persuaded, at least not in my family. “It’s a matter of context,” I said. “Ordinary powers in one world are superpowers in another. Take Superman.”
But Reg refused to take Superman. “Batman is as far as I’ll go,” he said. “I can go no farther.” Under that sexy cap, he had the brains of a bivalve and I was glad not to be the one sleeping with him.
Six
IN FACT, I’D never read Burroughs; it wasn’t a book my parents would have wanted in the house. All I knew about Tarzan was whatever was in the tap water. When Reg began to lecture me on the racism of the books, I didn’t know if the books were racist, which wouldn’t be Tarzan’s fault, or if Tarzan himself was racist, which would be more problematic. But I didn’t think I could win the argument by admitting ignorance. This left as my only option a quick God, look at the time withdrawal.
I walked home alone through the dark grid of downtown streets. A long train thundered past on my right, setting off the lights and bells of the barrier arms. There was a cold wind flipping the leaves on the trees, and outside Woodstock’s Pizza, a loose scrum of men I crossed the street to avoid. One of them shouted an invitation to me, but it was uninviting.
Todd was still up and he hadn’t read Burroughs, either, but there was a manga version—New Jungle King Tar-chan—and he was all over that. Tar-chan had superpowers. Most definitely. Todd tried to describe the series to me (which seemed to be a sprightly mix of cooking and pornography) and offered to bring me some issues next time he went home, but it wasn’t clear I wouldn’t have to be able to read Japanese.
I couldn’t get him focused on the point now—that Reg was an asshole—because he was so busy making his own: that Masaya Tokuhiro was a genius. Anyway, it was becoming less clear to me that Reg had been so egregiously out of line. And why had I been jabbering away about Tarzan in the first place? That was indiscreet. I must have been very drunk.
• • •
A NIGHT OR TWO LATER, I finally treed Ezra. He had my suitcase, but I was still being punished; it wasn’t convenient just then to turn it over. “You’re too busy?” I asked incredulously. How many floors did he think this apartment building had?
“Correctamundo,” he told me. “That you don’t think so just shows how little you know.”
Two more days passed before he unlocked the broom closet—(there’s shit in there that could seriously fuck up the wells. You could poison the whole town if you wanted, Ezra had told me. It was his job to keep that shit out of the hands of the sort of terrorists who lived on the third floor)—and pulled the suitcase out. It was hard-shelled and powder-blue.
“Oh, yeah,” Ezra said. “I forgot. This guy came by yesterday, said he was your brother Travers. He wanted to wait for you, but I told him he couldn’t even imagine the hissy fit you’d throw if I let some friend or family member stay in your place when you weren’t there.”
I was torn between my disbelief that the visitor had really been my brother, a happy amazement that he’d come for me at last, and a steaming disappointment that Ezra had sent him off, probably never to return. These were complicated things to be feeling simultaneously. My heart flopped in my chest like a hooked fish.
Although my parents continued to get the occasional postcard, the last word I’d personally had from my brother came when I graduated high school. It’s a big world, he’d written on the back of a picture of Angkor Wat. Get big. The postmark was London, which meant he could have been anywhere but there. The fact that my brother’s name was not Travers was the most persuasive detail in Ezra’s account. My brother would never have used his real name.
“Did he say he’d come back?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe he said in a couple of days.”
“A couple like two days or a couple like a few days? Did he say a couple or did he say a few?”
But Ezra had had enough. Ezra believed in dispensing information only on a need-to-know basis. He sucked on his teeth and said he couldn’t remember for sure. He’d been busy. He had an apartment building to run.
When we were kids, my brother was my favorite person in the whole world. He could be, and often was, awful, but there were other times. He’d spent hours teaching me to play catch and also cards. Casino and I doubt it, gin rummy, go fish, hearts, and spades. He was a good poker player, but under his tutelage, I was better, if only because I was so little no one expected me to be. We made some serious book off his friends. They paid him in cash, but I took my winnings in the more universal currency of Garbage Pail Kids cards. I used to have hundreds of those. Buggy Betty, the little green-fly girl, was my favorite. She had such a nice smile.
r /> One day, Steven Claymore threw a snowball at me with a rock inside, because I’d said he was ineluctable, which he didn’t like the sound of but proved true. I came home with a spongy lump on my forehead and some gravel in my knee. The next day my brother showed up at school where he held Steven’s arm behind his back until Steven apologized and then my brother took me to Dairy Queen and bought me a chocolate-dipped cone with his own money. There was trouble about this later, both the arm-twisting and the two of us leaving our respective schools without telling anyone, but the family rules of conduct had gotten all vague and convoluted where my brother was concerned and there were no real consequences for either of us.
• • •
SO I’D HAD several reasons for choosing to come to UC Davis.
First, it was far enough from home that no one would know anything about me.
Second, my mother and father had said okay. We’d visited the campus together and they’d found the town practically midwestern. They were particularly besotted with the spacious bike lanes.
But third, and really, I’d come because of my brother, and my parents must have known and had their own hopes. Ordinarily, my father kept his wallet nailed shut and all the bike lanes in all the midwestern-type towns in the world wouldn’t have had him forking over a year of out-of-state tuition when there were perfectly good universities right there in Indiana, one of them merely blocks away.
But the FBI had told us that my brother had been in Davis in the spring of ’87, about a year after he took off, and the government can’t be wrong about everything; even a stopped clock, etc. They’d never said anywhere else they thought he’d been, only Davis.
And I just didn’t think I could do it anymore, this business of being my parents’ only child. In my fantasies, my brother would rattle his knuckles on my apartment door and I’d open it, not expecting a thing, thinking maybe it was Ezra coming to borrow Todd’s Game Boy or instituting new protocols for the building regarding hazardous trash. I would recognize him instantly. God, I’ve missed you, my brother would say, pulling me into a hug. Tell me everything that’s happened since I left.